Ham and Bean Soup with Veggies: One-Pot Meal

Soup is a gift to busy people. Truly. If you make a pot of hearty soup on the weekend, you’ll always have a quick and easy dinner at the ready. You can freeze individual portions, too, in case you’re one of those folks who doesn’t love eating the same dish two nights in a row. Then just pop your soup into a microwave-safe bowl and you’ll have dinner in minutes.

Bean soup may be the greatest soup gift of all, especially when, as in this recipe for Ham and Bean Soup with Veggies, it’s a hearty, incredibly easy one-pot meal. This is a recipe that takes the idea of adding ham to soup seriously, calling for meaty smoked pork hocks or a meaty ham bone, which give the dish much more flavor than simply adding ham you’ve already cooked and chopped. (Of course, you’re more than welcome to do that as an alternative.)

It doesn’t wimp out on the vegetables, either: onion, celery, chopped parsnips (or rutabaga), carrots, and spinach join the beans and ham for a soup that could rightfully be called a full-fledged stew, loaded with protein, fiber, and vitamins. And that’s a soup fit to be called dinner.